Typography
Friday, July 5, 2002[7:00:01 PM]
More than once, I've eaten breakfast at Cafe Borrone, and read whatever newspaper happened to be left around. Several years ago, people mostly read the San Jose Mercury News -- not the San Francisco Chronicle.
SJMN did a makeover, and now almost everyone reads the Chronicle.
SJMN now looks like the early days of desktop publishing where people tried to use as many different typefaces as possible. The centered headlines serve as final proof of why nobody does headlines that way.
The worst part is the typeface used for body text. It's complicated without being pleasant, and large without being readable. They wanted to use much taller characters than other newspapers, but then they shoved them together horizontally, and then shoved the lines of text together vertically. The overall effect is that the letters are bigger, but more difficult to read than the SF paper.
People should look at the New York Times' type. If you can't do better, just copy theirs. Notice the breathing room each character has, and the space between lines.
Newspapers generally justify lines. I believe the reason is that their lines are so short, the variation in line-length of ragged lines would be a significant fraction of the total length.
[6:35:41 PM]
William Stout Design Books at 27-A South Park in San Francisco is a fine place. Literally shelves of books on typography. There's a copy of "Finer Points in the spacing and arrangement of Type" there now. By the standard quirk of capitalism, there are also many larger, shinier books of dreadfully wrong typographic advice. Alas.
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Last update: 9/20/03; 2:54:31 PM.